Two-day conference on big data

Bangalore-based tech event management firm HasGeek is organising a conference that focusses on the big data ecosystem in India on July 27 and 28. Titled ‘The Fifth Elephant’, the event brings together speakers who have worked extensively with technology, statistical and mathematical tools, and user interfaces for mining, analysing and representing data.

The conference attempts to showcase the technology landscape which, today, makes it possible to work with data and leverage on its predictive powers, a release from HasGeek stated. On the first day of the conference, participants would be able to get an understanding of the technologies available for managing big data, analytics and visualisation.

On the second day, talks schedules would focus on explaining how technology is being applied in retail, medicine, IT, finance and governance to manage and analyse data. The event features speakers from Red Hat, Splunk, Google, Strand Life Sciences, IBM, Flipkart, HP Analytics, Mu-Sigma, Amazon, PayPal and MediaNama, among others.

According to the release, the keynote talks would cover topics such as how Google crunches big data at Google scale, community architecture and big data at Red Hat, the genomics project and challenges of big data in personalised medicine, and the process of building Watson and natural language processing.

The two-day event is being held at the NIMHANS Convention Centre. For more details, log on to: http://fifthelephant.in or emailinfo@hasgeek.com

Workshop on Web privacy tools

A one-day workshop was conducted by the Free Software Movement Karnataka (FSMK) for engineering and MCA students at the PES Institute of Technology. Over 100 students participated in the workshop that focussed on training on Free Software tools for Internet privacy and security.

This workshop series, the second in the city, is part of the FSMK’s campaign against Internet censorship. Sessions included a basic introductory session on why Internet censorship is a problem, TOR (The Onion Router that enables anonymity online) and training on network power tools such as Nmap, Wireshark, Mausezahn. Another session was dedicated to sharing information on how to secure yourselves online. The sessions focussed on encouraging a culture of hacking among technology students.

Bringing together thought leaders from cloud, application, and service providers, along with experts from enterprises, this site offers a forum to facilitate discussions around industry issues and share best-practices for cloud adoption, a release from Infosys stated.

According to Vishnu Bhat, vice-president and Global Head – Cloud, Infosys, said: “As organizations navigate their cloud journey, they are challenged to manage its enormous complexities and yet leverage the cloud’s true potential to drive efficiencies and growth. A forum like this is our endeavour to demystify what it takes for businesses to build their cloud-enabled enterprises of tomorrow.”

Cloudecosystem.com is set up in collaboration with UBM TechWeb, a tech media firm.

Discussing future of workplace for women

Networking major Cisco hosted its annual Connected Women’s Leadership Forum (CWLF) 2012, on Friday on the Cisco Globalisation Centre East campus in Bangalore. This is the fifth edition of the event, which is attended by women professionals from leading organisations in Bangalore.

The theme for this year’s event was ‘Beyond boundaries: shaping the future’, and was focussed on the changing nature of work and future workplaces. The event was attended by over 300 professionals, and aimed at providing attendees an insight into how to make it big in a global environment, a release from Cisco stated.

Two panel discussions on ‘Winning in a global environment’ and ‘Enablers for a successful career/ resilient leaders’ were also held.

Citrix on R&D expansion

IT solutions firm Citrix unveiled a new building on its Bangalore campus, and announced the expansion of its research and development wing in Hyderabad. The company’s R&D centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad work on online collaboration, data sharing, virtual desktops, cloud networking and cloud platform solutions, a release from the company stated.

Rakesh Singh, vice-president and General Manager, Citrix India, said: “The expansion of our R&D footprint to Hyderabad means that we can now harness a wider talent pool to develop and deliver mobile and cloud solutions for our customers and partners worldwide.”

A symposium on innovation and IP

The GE India Technology Centre, Bangalore, and the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India hosted the fifth annual Innovation and Intellectual Property Symposium at the centre. The symposium focussed on the evolution of the Indian Innovation ecosystem and addressed the challenges in the current IP ecosystem in India, a press release from GE stated.

The event highlighted the importance of nurturing innovation and how such creations and technologies need to be protected by the country.